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Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Friday 11 June 2010

‘Fail whale' pops up as World Cup fans overwhelm Twitter - 65 million tweets a day from 190 million users -

‘Fail whale' pops up as World Cup fans overwhelm Twitter - 65 million tweets a day from 190 million users -






Despite assurances that Twitter would be ready to handle the hype of the World Cup, users were seeing a lot of the fail whale on Friday.
The fail whale is a smiling cartoon whale that pops up whenever Twitter is overwhelmed with traffic.
Earlier in the week, a spokeswoman told The Canadian Press that Twitter should be able to handle the floods of traffic the World Cup was sure to bring.
Robin Sloan said Twitter is used to high levels of traffic, although she conceded the World Cup will probably be the biggest event the site has dealt with to date.
Twitter typically gets 65 million tweets a day from its more than 190 million users.
"The World Cup is probably the biggest organized human event on the planet, with more people paying attention to the same thing at the same time — for a whole month!" she said.
"We're checking and double-checking our capacity — although keep in mind that at this point, we're already handling more than 65 million tweets per day, so while the World Cup is indeed going to be huge, we're used to huge."